CreativePro.Com Features

Free For All: Winter Holidays Edition

Editor in Chief — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 02:18:15 -0700

Happy Holidays!

Allow me to kick off the gift-giving season while helping you bundle up against the bitter chill of uninspiration with this jolly collection of Christmas, Hanukah, New Year’s, and winter clip art, photos, fonts, and other fare. Remember: You can download one free resource tonight; you have to wait to unwrap the rest tomorrow morning.

Fonts

How to Use Color Effectively in Your Designs

Editor in Chief — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:03:00 -0700

Color can strongly influence the mood of a design. You probably know that, but have you ever wondered how one color can have two or more meanings?

Red, for example, can mean love but it can also represent aggression, danger, or violence. With all of those feelings associated with the color red, how do you know when it says which and what will be the connotation of red in your design?

A Question of Character: Finding What You Need in Your Fonts, Part 2

Editor in Chief — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:13:14 -0700

In the previous installment of this column, I talked about the first generation of scalable, digital desktop fonts, the so-called single-byte fonts that contained only a couple hundred characters or so. This time we dive into the deep end of the pool: double-byte fonts, big character sets, and awkward font navigation tools.

Creativeprose: Wacky Web Site of the Week Archive

admin — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:54:28 -0600

November 23, 2009
This site is all about charts and graphs, but it's not your typical business snore-fest. A recent favorite charts the appeal of "Twilight" in relation to the age of the female watcher.
http://www.graphjam.com

November 16, 2009
Recently discovered diaries of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre reveal a man obsessed not with the void, but with food. Read excerpts here.
http://www.pvspade.com/Sartre/cookbook.html

InDesign Magazine: Tip of the Week Archive

admin — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:43:16 -0600

We regularly update this compilation of the Tip-of-the-Week mailings from InDesign Magazine. To receive the tips in your in-box, sign up here.

Sort Paragraphs Alphabetically
For basic alphabetical sorting of paragraph text -- bulleted lists, numbered lists, or just plain paragraphs -- use SortParagraphs.jsx, a script that comes with InDesign.

Flickr Friday: November 13, 2009

Editor in Chief — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:40:59 -0700

"The Eyes of Black Cat" was shot by rachdian:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rachdian/ / CC BY 2.0

Free For All: Photoshop Brushes, Fonts, and Image Tools

Editor in Chief — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:59:51 -0600

ColorSuckr
Print and Web designers and illustrators often want to extract one or more colors from an image. Typically, it's a tedious process of clicking the Eyedropper tool to pick up the desired color, switching to the Swatches panel, and creating and naming a new swatch, or hovering the Eyedropper tool over pixels and writing down the color value from the Info panel. The more colors in the image, the longer and more boring this process is likely to become.

Until now.

Flickr Friday: November 6, 2009

Editor in Chief — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:27:25 -0700

Most images showcased in Flickr Friday have Creative Commons licenses that allow for sharing and remixing, as long as proper attribution is given to the image originator.

This week's Flickr Friday installment is a demonstration of that license in action. The first image is a photo (titled only "IMG_0438") shot by axio in Hofburg, Vienna:

Flickr Friday Archives

Editor in Chief — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:27:39 -0600

This weekly CreativePro.com feature showcases graphics (photos, vector illustrations, and videos) from online image-sharing site Flickr. Some of these have even been approved for commercial use under the Creative Commons license. That means that as long as you follow the license details outlined by the creator, you can use the materials in your own work for free!

Flickr Friday: July 31, 2009

Industry Analysis: The Quiet Revolution in Proprietary File Formats

admin — Thu, 22 Jan 2004 03:10:12 -0700

From The Pfeiffer Report. To learn more about The Pfeiffer Report, click here.

Create Better Marketing Postcards

Editor in Chief — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 02:46:53 -0600

This article originally appeared on Print Soup, the blog of PrintingForLess.com, CreativePro.com's parent company.

A Question of Character: Finding What You Need in Your Fonts, Part 1

Editor in Chief — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 02:59:32 -0600

When I asked a few columns back about your interest in Unicode, a lot of hands shot up. But just as many of you said you wanted to know how to get at characters that have been hiding in your fonts since long before Unicode was dreamt up. Unicode may be the key to understanding and using fonts with very large character sets, but on a daily basis most of us use smaller -- and often much older -- fonts that present mysteries of their own.

Flickr Friday: October 30, 2009

Editor in Chief — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:40:57 -0600

Flickr user madmolecule took the shot below with a matchbox pinhole camera loaded with 200 speed 35mm Fuji film. Exposure was “maybe a minute or two -- I've given up trying to use a stopwatch; I just eyeball it now.” So that vignetting you see is the real thing, not software trickery.

If you’re not familiar with the wonderful world of pinhole cameras, take a minute to check out these fun and informative links:

Free For All: An Awesome Assortment

Editor in Chief — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 02:23:51 -0600

Your Handwriting as a Font
Back in the 1990s, design-related magazines carried ads for mail-order services that converted your handwriting into a font. You had to wait to receive a template on which you'd draw each character or glyph of the font, and then you had to wait for your TrueType font to arrive on a 3.5-inch floppy. Now there’s a free online service that converts your handwriting into a font in as little as five minutes.

Inside the Publishing Revolution: How the LaserWriter and Photoshop Changed the World

admin — Tue, 03 Dec 2002 03:56:56 -0700

Excerpted from "Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story" (Adobe Press/Peachpit Press).